February 2013

Nine months on, General Levy's "Incredible" looks
like a fluke; despite radio play and a seductive melody,
Metalheads' "Inner City Life" failed to crack the Top 40. Jungle
doesn't look like it's gonna become pop music after all. Maybe
sped-up breakbeats will always prove too disruptive for mass
consumption. But the real problem, I suspect, is that the Song is
simply too staid and unwieldy an entity to ride Jungle's unstable,
self-rupturing aesthetic. So far the best attempt at song-oriented
Jungle is Princess's "Say I'm Your No 1", as remixed/re-produced by
Steve Gurley, formerly of Foul Play: here, two different kinds of
swing (Eighties R&B and drum 'n' bass) entwine perfectly to
make for as nubile a slice of 'lover's Jungle' as you could wish
for. Generally, though, Jungle - like most post-rave musics - isn't
about songs, it's about hooks. Jungle's radicalism is that its
drum-patterns are as catchy as its synth-motifs or vocal samples,
e.g. Omni Trio's "Renegade Snares", where the snare tattoo is the
mnemonic, rather than the stuttering diva-chorus or three-note
piano figure.

Omni is about as pop as drum 'n' bass gets these days. Since the
explosion of media and record biz interest last Summer, there's
been a concerted shift by the scene's leading artists away from
anything that panders to mainstream sensibilities. Determined to
sabotage the co-option process and protect Jungle's underground
status, the key producers are studiously shunning anything that
smacks of either Ragga (the term 'Jungle' has been displaced by the
more neutral and formalist 'drum 'n' bass' ) or pop appeal. Instead
of hefty chunks of melody or lyrics, vocal samples tend now to be
the merest mood-establishing tint of abstract emotion; keyboard
motifs rarely amount to anything as memorable as a riff, just
timbral washes and jazzy cadences.

Esotericism, elegance and elitism are the watchwords. Jungle's
current obsession with being 'deep', its disowning of its roots in
rave, has coincided neatly with its belated rehabilitation by the
very people who once derided and ignored Hardcore back in 1992-93.
As a result, drum 'n' bass has been reintegrated into the spectrum
of 'cool' music, where it rubs shoulders with trip-hop and
intelligent Techno. Accompanying this legitimisation process has
been a subtle rewriting of history, with Detroit-aligned icons like
Carl Craig and The Black Dog being cited as formative influences by
some artists, while other key ancestors, perhaps too redolent of
Ardkore's 'one dimensional' juvenilia are conveniently forgotten
(Joey Beltram, Mantronix, The Prodigy).

None of this would particularly matter (the politics of hip
being as irrelevant to true creativity as ever), except that
Jungle's new legitimacy, and the scene's flattered self-image, is
feeding back into the music, often to quite deleterious effect.
Here I survey some of the directions in which artists are pushing
the music in a misguided attempt to make it 'grow up', then focus
on those who are really extending, rather than diluting, the
renegade essence of drum 'n' bass. Jungle no longer needs
uncritical boosterism; the scene, like Techno and Ambient before
it, is reaching dangerous levels of over-production (in both the
quantitative and technical senses). The time for discrimination,
for rigorous aesthetic definition, is overdue.

Perhaps the biggest trend in Jungle right now is fusion. Drum
'n' bass has always been a hybrid, anti-essentialist style. In the
early Ardkore days, this took the form of a collage-based, cut-up
aesthetic. That fissile approach has now been replaced by a
seamless emulsion of influences. There's also an explicit
reinvocation of 70s jazz-fusion, and of later styles influenced by
that era (jazz-funk, Detroit Techno, Garage). A crucial mid-94
release that trailblazed this smooth-core style was E-Z Rollers'
"Believe"/"Rolled Into One", tracks that combined jazz-tinged
chords and lambent, tremulous textures over float-like-a-butterfly
breakbeats. What was initially so captivating and unusual about
"Believe" and "Rolled" - the mellow mellifluousness - has
subsequently become a hegemony of tepid tastefulness. Tracks like
DJ Krust's "Jazz Note" or DJ Phantasy's "Atmosphere" amount to
little more than 21st century cocktail music.

Jazz here signifies flava not process; there's no
improv-combustion involved, just the use of a certain kind of
chords. 'Jazz' also relates to a very specific British black
tradition, where said chord-sequences and a polished fluency
connote relaxation, finesse, sophistication, upward mobility. And
so on KISS FM an influential DJ like Fabio will praise a track's
"rich, lavish production -real class!" then exhort breakbeat-fans
to "open their minds". All this passionate advocacy on behalf of
what is basically fuzak draped over unnecessarily fussy breaks.

Perhaps the two most totemic figures behind the phusion phad are
Alex Reece and Rupert Parkes (aka Photek, Aquarius, Studio
Pressure, et al). Revealingly, neither were around in the Ardkore
era, but only got into Jungle when it became 'musical'. Parkes's
reputation resides in his having made Jungle sound more like
'proper' Techno and less like its own baaad self. Straddling both
genres without innovating in either, he's infected Jungle with
Trance's funkless frigidity and pseudo-conceptual portentousness:
just dig those track titles, "Resolution", "Book of Changes", "Form
& Function"... Parkes actually admitted in i-D that he and his
posse "have more in common with Carl Craig's music than we do with
the majority of Jungle". In mitigation, it must be conceded that
the last Photek EP, The Water Margin, shows improved command of
swing and groove. But overall, everything that Parkes is applauded
for bringing to Jungle actually detracts from its ferocity.

I should have said much the same of Alex Reece, judging by the
emollient slinkiness of his Latin/jazz tinged debut "Basic
Principles", but he's redeemed himself by creating the monumental
"Pulp Fiction", which is due out on the Metalheadz label any week
now and has been the national anthem at LTJ Bukem's club Speed for
months. Based around an epic bassline distantly descended from
George Clinton's "Loopzilla", and featuring a horn motif-cum-solo
redolent of Miles' coked-out early 70s paranoiac phase, "Pulp
Fiction" dramatically expands drum 'n' bass's spectrum of moods and
sources without blunting its edge.

Another notable sub-style, pioneered by LTJ Bukem, picks up on
the cosmic/oceanic imagery of fusion and ambient. Based around
'quiet storm' diva-murmurs, nebulous texture-swirls and a radical
uneventfulness, Bukem's 1993 classics "Music" and "Atlantis" were
heretically at odds with the staccato freneticism of Ardkore.
Sadly, this aqua-funk serenity, as perpetuated by Bukem & Co
via his Good Looking/Looking Good imprint, seems to have become an
aesthetic cul de sac, if self-parodic titles like "Rain Fall" and
recurrent use of clichéd dolphin-like noises are any indication.
Bukem's latest, "Horizons" is closer to jacuzzi than gulf-stream;
its synth-arpeggios and watery texture-washes are way too New Agey,
as is the snatch of Maya Angelou poesy that witters on about how
"each new hour holds new chances for new beginnings/the horizon
leans forward, offering you space to place new steps for change".
Bah!

Forming a triangle with nu-fusion and oceanic Jungle is a
subgenre - call it 'hyper-soul' - that draws on the same kind of
soothing, silken 70s sources as G-funk, e.g. harmony groups like
The Dramatics. A pivotal track here is Doc Scott's "Faraway". At
first a rather sickly confection, with its limpid trickles of
wah-wah guitar and breathy angel-sighs, the track comes alive when
it strips down to guitar/bass/drums, sashaying with an irresistible
panache. By far the best G-funk junglists, though, are Hidden
Agenda, if only because "Is It Love?" has ten ideas where most
tracks content themselves with three, veering from dubwise menace
through summer-breezy soul shimmy (frothing Moogs, you half expect
to hear a clavinet come in any second) to sinister phusion, and
back again.

Drawing on the most oversubscribed elements of all these three
mini-aesthetics is an overcrowded Second Division of drum 'n' bass
units, artists like Essence Of Aura, Higher Sense, Adam F, Sounds
of Life, Wax Doctor, JMJ & Richie, Obsession, Northern
Connection, ad nauseam. Together, they have installed the
consensual middlebrow sound of '95. Start with an unnecessarily
elongated, 'teasing' intro; roll in the heavy-on-the-cymbals
breaks; layer some wordless female vocal samples (measured,
tasteful passion only, no helium-histrionics please); drag out the
track, through percussive breakdowns and wafting synth-interludes,
for eight minutes or longer; rinse the mix to get that airy, 'just
brushed freshness' that sounds good on a really crisp stereo (lots
of separation and ear-catching stereo-panning effects, natch).
There's nothing shallower than the music made by artists who have
been persuaded that Depth is where they should be at, but who don't
have what it takes to get there.
[page break]
So who's really 'deep'? What does 'deep' mean, anyway? I'd argue
that it's not some external notion of profundity borrowed from
another genre altogether (e.g. jazz), but rather about exploring
the style's essence, the stuff drum 'n' bass has got going on that
no other genre has (not even hiphop, Ragga and dub, although
they're all ancestors/inputs). With Jungle, that's
breakbeat-science and bass-mutation. Exempting from consideration
the key figures I discussed in last year's Ambient Jungle feature,
(i.e. Goldie, Foul Play, Omni, A Guy Called Gerald), here's a
provisional checklist of the crucial drum 'n' bass auteurs. Some
are new skool, others have been around in some guise or other since
Year Dot.

Roni Size and sidekick DJ Die are exemplars. This duo are
usually regarded as pioneers of jazz-Jungle, on account of their
early 94 classic "Music Box" and sequel "It's A Jazz Thing". Listen
again to "Music Box", though, and you realise that the sublime
cascades of fusion-era chimes are only a brief interlude in what's
basically a stripped down percussion workout. Size's late 94
monster "Timestretch" was even more austere, just escalating drums
and a chiming bassline that together resemble a clockwork
contraption gone mad. Size & Die's latest collaboration,
"11.55", and especially the "Roll Out Mix", is their most
minimal-is-maximalist effort yet. What initially registers as
merciless monotony reveals itself, on repeated plays, to be an
inexhaustibly listenable forest of densely tangled breaks and
multiple basslines (the latter acting both as subliminal,
ever-modulating melody and as sustained sub-aural pressure),
relieved only by the sparest shadings of sampled jazz colouration.
Such fiercely compressed, implosive creativity is an aesthetic
strategy of alienation analogous to bebop or free jazz, i.e. an
attempt to discover who's really down with the programme by
venturing deeper into the heart of blackness. Hence the track's
mood of brooding malevolence, its vague gangsta theme (the sample
that kicks off the track explains that 11.55 is when the hustlers
swagger en masse into the nightclub).

Like Roni Size, Dillinja is keeping alive Jungle's ghettocentric
menace without resorting to tired Ragga-isms: just check that
mobster moniker. He's also one of the very few producers to respond
to Ragga's rhythmic innovations, as opposed to just its
verbal/attitudinal aggression. Dillinja's justly renowned for the
melting melancholy of fusion-y tracks like "Deep Love" and "Angel's
Fall", but not enough attention has been paid to the viciously
disorientating properties of his beats and B-lines. "Warrior"
places the listener in the centre of an unfeasibly expanded drum
kit played by an octopus-limbed cyborg; the bass enters not as a
B-line but a one-note detonation, an impacted cluster of different
low-end frequencies/timbres/treatments. This track's aura of
abstract militancy also comes through in Bert & Dillinja's
collaboration "Lionheart", whose intro beat-sequence slashes and
scythes, feints and parries like a ninja warrior.

If Dillinja and Size & Die are developing drum 'n' bass as
martial art, Droppin' Science's work is more like a virtual
adventure playground, where collapsible breakbeats and trampoline
bass trigger kinesthetic responses, gradually recalibrating your
motor reflexes, hot-rodding the human nervous system in readiness
for an immeasurably swifter new millennium. Droppin Science's Danny
Breaks is a former b-boy whose first Ardkore incarnation was as the
scratchadelic Sonz of A Loop Da Loop Era. His five Droppin' Science
EPs since early 94 have evolved a fantastical fusion of electro and
dub that sounds like neither. On tracks like "Long Time Comin'"
(Vol 4) and "Step Off" (Vol 5), bass fibrillates like muscle with
electric current coursing through it, hi-hats incandesce like
fireworks in slow-mo, beats seem to run backward as uncannily as
trick photography of a fallen house of cards tumbling back
together. And melody limits itself to minimal motifs where the
eerie fluorescent glow of the synth-plasma is the real hook.

Another innovative drum 'n' bass essentialist is Asend. As half
of Dead Dred, he was responsible for last year's "Dred Bass", whose
skidding breaks and backward bass constituted a landmark in
Jungle's development into a rhythmic psychedelia. This year, as
half of NC & Asend, he's crafted another ultra-minimal classic
of compulsion-for-compulsion's sake, "Take Your Soul", whose
one-and-a-half note bassline, percussive/textural as opposed to
melodic, lodges itself in your memory-flesh as viciously as a
flechette. Texturally closer to the fuzak-squad, Blame &
Justice are also doing astonishing rhythmic stuff underneath all
the Joe Zawinul-esque synth-foliage. On "Nightvision", and on Blame
solo tracks like "Sub Committee", there's an effect like a
sampladelic equivalent of the way a drummer will let the stick
vibrate on the skin, rather than make a crisp hit - a sound like a
spinning coin that's starting to decelerate. "Nightvision" is so
reverb-riddled and elasticated, so nuanced with percussive accents
and hyper-syncopations, it's virtually a drum solo, albeit
constructed painstakingly over days as opposed to happening in
real-time.

Of course, there's a point at which this approach becomes
virtuosity for virtuosity's sake, when the breakbeat bombastics get
so fiddly and fucked up that any sense of groove is lost. Dillinja
and Size, Asend and Danny Breaks, these are the Jimi Hendrixes and
Jimmy Pages of polyrhythm; Lord help us when the Eddie Van Halens
and Gary Moores materialise.

What's going on in drum 'n' bass right now is a productive
conflict between two rival models of blackness, one American, the
other ultimately derived from Africa, via the Bronx and Jamaica:
elegant urbanity (jazz-lite, smooth soul) vs. ruffneck tribalism
(hiphop, ragga, dub - all based on African music principles like
bass frequencies, polyrhythms, repetition). From a drum 'n' bass
novice's viewpoint, artists like Dillinja, Roni Size, and Droppin'
Science constitute the deep end. They are consciously engaged in
purging any and all concessions to non-Jungle criteria. Even more
than the nu-fusion esoterics, these artists are ferociously
distancing drum 'n' bass from pop, not in deference to an
ill-conceived notion of maturity but simply because they're
impelled to plunge ever deeper into the anti-populist imperatives
of the art's core, which means intensifying all the stuff that
happens beneath/beyond the non-initiate's perceptual thresholds.
They are doing things for which we don't yet have a language.

Most of the artists and syndromes discussed
above are documented on the following compilations:Jungle
Renegades Volume One (Re-Animate), Artcore
(REACT), DJs Unite Volume Two (Death Becomes Me),
Spectrum (ffrr)